It is now October, the month where cooler weather finally sets in here in southern California. Another phenomenon which sets arises is the (now) month-wide celebration of Halloween, and its primary sign for me is the horror movie. What brought this to my attention was a survey a friend took part in on Facebook which asks for our favorite horror movie. I noticed a fair variety of responses, but the thing which I noticed about them was that, of those I've seen, most didn't seem very scary to me. I guess I've become jaded, but I do think the bar has been raised quite a bit over the years. Few, if any, films seem genuinely scary any more. They can be entertaining, and atmospheric, and disgusting, and jolting, but not really, gut-wrenchingly frightening. I am, of course, measuring modern-day films against those I saw many years ago, in my youth. It seems that what then was so frightening has become rather tame, but at the time they just hit home-runs of true horror.
I remember the first really scary film I ever saw (outside of childhood), "The Night of the Living Dead." I saw it when I was in high school with a friend at a drive-in. I remember sitting in the car, scared to death, especially when people walked by on their way to the snack bar. It stopped being a movie and became the real thing! I finally had to get out of the car and go to the snack bar myself. But my all-time scary experience was seeing "The Exorcist" three days after it opened with some people from the dorm at college. I had no idea what I was getting into, and I was so freaked out that I "watched" most of the film from behind closed eyes. Of course, this didn't help a lot, as the sounds made it worse in my imagination. Plus, the audience was freaking out as well - a communal freak-out, something you don't get very often - people actually fled the theater. (I understand this happened with "Psycho" and "Alien" as well.) In my experience, this is a rare experience in the theater nowadays: we are more "sophisticated" or, perhaps, jaded; our threshold for such experiences much lower. Those two films seem almost quaint now: what's the big deal? We get cheap jolts, or gross-outs, or thrillers, but not deep, gut-wrenching terror where we want to flee and the catharsis is completely satisfiying. Maybe it's just me and the effects of age and experience, but such films which are societal events are rare to non-existent. We seem to be overwhelmed with stimulation - film, tv, internet, news, etc., that what comes through has little chance of really hitting hard.
I remember the first really scary film I ever saw (outside of childhood), "The Night of the Living Dead." I saw it when I was in high school with a friend at a drive-in. I remember sitting in the car, scared to death, especially when people walked by on their way to the snack bar. It stopped being a movie and became the real thing! I finally had to get out of the car and go to the snack bar myself. But my all-time scary experience was seeing "The Exorcist" three days after it opened with some people from the dorm at college. I had no idea what I was getting into, and I was so freaked out that I "watched" most of the film from behind closed eyes. Of course, this didn't help a lot, as the sounds made it worse in my imagination. Plus, the audience was freaking out as well - a communal freak-out, something you don't get very often - people actually fled the theater. (I understand this happened with "Psycho" and "Alien" as well.) In my experience, this is a rare experience in the theater nowadays: we are more "sophisticated" or, perhaps, jaded; our threshold for such experiences much lower. Those two films seem almost quaint now: what's the big deal? We get cheap jolts, or gross-outs, or thrillers, but not deep, gut-wrenching terror where we want to flee and the catharsis is completely satisfiying. Maybe it's just me and the effects of age and experience, but such films which are societal events are rare to non-existent. We seem to be overwhelmed with stimulation - film, tv, internet, news, etc., that what comes through has little chance of really hitting hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment